Third Transmission (26 page)

Six held his breath. No van came roaring down the road.

‘Okay,' he said. ‘Where to?'

‘How secure is King's house?' she asked.

Six thought about it. ‘Secure enough,' he said.

When he saw Six on the doorstep, King didn't glance around to check his front porch was otherwise empty. He didn't even say hello. He just launched forwards and hugged Six so tightly Six could hardly breathe.

‘Hi, boss,' Ace said from behind them. ‘Mind if we come in?'

King released Six. ‘Sure,' he said. His eyes were red around the edges. He stood aside, and Ace walked through the doorway. Six didn't follow.

‘You're not coming in?' King asked.

Six shook his head.

‘What?' Ace turned. ‘Why?'

‘I have to go to the Tower,' Six said. His eyes met King's. ‘My next mission.'

King nodded. ‘Of course.'

There was a long silence. Six knew King sometimes had trouble expressing himself, particularly when it came to farewells. Six shared this problem – anything
too casual and it seemed like he didn't care the person was leaving, too intimate and it sounded as though he didn't expect to see them again.

‘Good luck,' King said finally.

‘Thanks,' Six replied. ‘See you when I get back.'

King nodded, and walked back into the house.

‘I see where you get it,' Ace whispered.

‘Yeah,' Six said. ‘But I could have done a lot worse.'

‘I can come with you,' Ace said. ‘On the mission. I can help.'

‘Thanks. But I have to do this on my own.'

Ace went quiet for a moment. A fragment of their earlier conversation surfaced in Six's mind:
You can be pretty certain that you'll die on a mission – it's just a matter of guessing which one.

Is this my last mission? he wondered. Will I see her again? Is that what she's thinking about?

‘Then call me when it's over,' Ace said. She placed a hand on his shoulder. Squeezed it. ‘Okay?'

‘Okay.'

Six started walking back up King's driveway towards the motorbike.

Aren't there things you've never done?

He heard Ace turn away and touch the doorhandle.

Things you'd like to do before you die?

Yes, he realised. There are.

Suddenly he was facing the house again. He was walking back towards the doorway. Then he was running. Then Ace held out her arms, and Six stepped
forwards into her embrace, resting his palm against her cheek as he pressed his lips clumsily against her smile. Her skin was soft and warm. Her hair smelled faintly like a fruit-flavoured soft drink. He held one hand to her back and felt her heartbeat and thought he'd never touched anything so perfect.

Their mouths parted. She stared at him.

Was that a mistake? Six thought, suddenly terrified. Did I misjudge everything?

‘Six,' she said.

‘Yeah.'

‘Come back alive,' she said. ‘So we can go on that date.'

Six felt his mouth pull into a grin against his will. ‘Okay,' he said.

‘Okay,' she said.

And he walked away again, and when he turned his head to look back, she was still watching him with a smile as strong as his.

FROM ABOVE

The F-60 fighter jet blasted through the night sky, dirty clouds sweeping across its ocean-grey flanks. The sky grew darker as the altitude increased – less and less fog was separating it from outer space.

Six was lying in a triangular pod fused to the bottom of the jet. On the inside, it wasn't so different from the torpedo he'd been in yesterday morning. Cramped, dark, noisy. There was a little more leg room, because the pod's fuel tank was smaller. The safety harness was bigger and more intricate. And there was a small window in front of his face, through which he could see the fading lights of the City.

Kyntak's voice came through Six's headset. ‘You did
what
?'

‘I kissed Ace,' he said again. He was still grinning. This was the best he'd ever felt going into a mission. In fact, this might be the best he'd ever felt, end of story.

‘No way!' Kyntak said.

‘Yes way.'

‘With tongue?'

‘Kyntak!'

Six could picture Kyntak grinning mischievously in the cockpit. ‘Well, congratulations! I didn't even know you liked her.'

‘Neither did I, until yesterday,' Six admitted.

‘What happened yesterday?'

‘I got burned by acid and she saved me.'

‘
I
saved you,' Kyntak said.

‘You saved me from being burned alive – she saved me from dying of infection.'

‘So she's your knight in shining armour, then.'

‘Yeah. Plus, you should see her drive.'

Six realised that he'd never actually experienced happiness before. He'd thought of himself as being happy when no-one was shooting at him, or when he had no physical injuries, or when he'd finished a mission and no-one had been killed. But happiness had been defined by a lack of bad events rather than the presence of good ones.

He'd seen real happiness on other people's faces, but had never really understood the power of it until now. It ?lled you with a volatile energy that enhanced your senses, making the world seem warmer and brighter, and it made you want to fiex every muscle in your body. Ridiculous as it seemed to him, Six's toes were wiggling in his shoes.

He had been relieved to hear that no-one, besides Vanish's troops, had died in the explosion. Kyntak had made sure everyone was out of the building before the bomb went off. Now the other agents were mostly
recovering at their own homes, although a few had congregated in Jack's basement to discuss the future of the organisation.

Vanish's body hadn't been recovered.

‘Are you sure you're ready for this mission?' Kyntak was asking.

‘Definitely,' Six said. ‘I've never felt better.'

‘That's what I meant. Are you in the right mindset?

Are you going to be able to focus?'

‘Yep,' Six said. ‘Before, going in, I was always thinking one thing – that I didn't want to die. But now I've got something more than that. Now I actually want to
live
.'

‘That's really cheesy,' Kyntak said.

‘That's exactly what Ace would say,' Six said, smiling in the dark.

And then the missile hit the jet.

Six's forehead slammed against the thick plastic window as the pod lurched, and sparks burst in his eyes. ‘Kyntak!' he roared. ‘What the hell was that?'

‘It's ChaoSonic!' Kyntak shouted. Six could hear the screaming of alarms in the background. ‘Looks like someone noticed our flight-path registration was bogus – they're shooting missiles at us!'

Six tightened the safety straps across his chest. ‘How bad are we hurt?'

‘They just clipped the port wing, we're okay, but I can't see them, can't shoot back –'

BOOM! The jet lurched again and Six saw a spray of fire flash past the window, then a few belches of smoke.

‘Kyntak, talk to me!'

The plane jerked underneath him as Kyntak fired two missiles of his own. Six heard the hiss of the exhaust trails as they blasted away, then a distract
crack
as one of them detonated.

‘Kyntak!'

‘Yeah, I got him,' Kyntak said. ‘He's turning back. But there's more coming.'

‘What's the damage?'

‘We're dead.' Kyntak's voice was frighteningly even.

‘The tank's haemorrhaging fuel. Can't land, can't run.

There's three more bogies on the scanner, but we've only got two more missiles.'

Six's heart felt like it was jammed inside his neck. ‘How high are we?'

‘Not high enough,' Kyntak said.

Six heard another gasp of missile exhaust – but this one was getting louder. Fired at them, not by them. Kyntak swore and Six felt the jet swing sideways, and then he actually saw the missile rocket past the window, huge and grey and intimidating. The flames behind it lit up the whole pod for a second, and then it was gone, leaving a trail of black smoke. Six heard it explode in the distance, and the pod rattled around him.

‘You have to eject,' he said.

‘No,' Kyntak replied.

Hiss
. The jet went into a barrel roll, and Six squeezed his eyes shut so he didn't have to watch the clouds whirl past. The missile exploded somewhere in the dark sky.

‘Do it, Kyntak!'

‘We're not high enough yet,' Kyntak insisted.

They were 30 kliks up – almost in outer space. The pull of gravity was rapidly getting fainter. Most people assumed that zero gravity would feel like floating in a swimming pool, but Six knew that wasn't true. It was more like falling. Like one of those nightmares where you plummet forever and never seem to hit the ground. Your organs all felt higher in your torso than they should be, and with nothing to hold them down, they bumped nauseatingly against one another.

Hiss. Lurch. Boom.

‘Damn it, Kyntak, eject!' Six yelled. ‘We're not going to make it! They won't keep missing forever!'

Kyntak grunted, ‘Almost there.'

Six's clothes billowed around his limbs, gravity no longer constraining them. He stared out the window as they broke through the last of the clouds, revealing the stars – pinpricks of light coming from suns that burned hundreds of billions of kilometres away, light that took decades just to reach him.

‘We're there!' Kyntak bellowed triumphantly. ‘Bombs away!'

And Six felt the pod separate from the jet and begin to fall back down towards the earth, slowly at first, but gaining speed with every second. It tipped over until he was upside down, because his head was at the heavier end.

HISS!

The explosion shook the pod. What happened? Six thought. Who fired? Who was hit? What's going on? ‘Kyntak?' he demanded. ‘
Kyntak!
'

Then he saw burning pieces of Kyntak's jet falling alongside him, raining up past his window, the metal blackened and smoking.

‘No,' he whispered. Then, louder, ‘No!'

The chunks of jet disappeared as he re-entered the fog, and suddenly the pod was falling very fast. Six's teeth rattled as he plummeted headfirst towards the ground. All the blood flooded into his skull until his eyeballs ached.

Fog and smog and smoke blew past the window, faster and faster until it was just a flickering blur. Six felt the thrusters at his feet kick in, guiding the pod to a target he couldn't see. The sound was deafening, like static on a TV turned up way too loud, and it mixed with the roar of the wind buffeting the pod to become white noise that pummelled Six's brain.

He reached up and tugged the earpiece out and jammed it in his pocket. Then he replaced it with a pair of rubber earplugs. There was supposed to be a warning beep two seconds before impact, but he didn't really need to hear it.

The iron roof of the Tower could stand 1000 kilograms per square inch. Six's pod weighed only 800 kilograms, and the tip was 20 centimetres wide. But it was travelling at 300 kliks per hour and accelerating.

If it was going fast enough when he hit, the pod should tear through the roof like a sledgehammer
through plywood. But if it wasn't, it would crumple like a chip packet, and he'd be crushed to a pulp inside.

Either way, Six thought, this was going to be loud. He shut his eyes.

Light flickering behind eyelids.

Thrusters st ut te ri ng to a stop.

Wind rushing.

Shaking metal.

Heart thumping.

               
Beep
.

Silence.

SMASH!

TRANSMISSION

Six was blind.

No, he wasn't.

It was just dark. And quiet.

Crumpled metal under his fingers. Grit that might once have been his window.

His body felt like one massive bruise. The impact had been hard enough to burst blood vessels.

He reached up to his chest, felt around for the buckle on the safety harness, clicked it. The straps fell away to the sides. He leaned forwards and groaned.

The world still sounded dark and muffied. He pulled out the earplugs and fumbled around for the earpiece.

‘Kyntak? Kyntak, are you there?'

Nothing but static.

Six tried to remember if he'd seen any pieces of the cockpit among the falling debris. Maybe the missile had only destroyed the wing of the plane. Maybe Kyntak had been able to make an emergency landing somewhere. Maybe he was okay.

Maybe not. There had been a lot of burning pieces.

Six pushed his hand against the button that was supposed to crack open the pod. Nothing happened. He pressed it again. Still nothing.

Well, it had been a pretty rough landing. Six raised his legs and rested the soles of his feet against the wall and pushed as hard as he could.

The metal splintered around the hinges and the pod split into two giant halves. Six fell to the floor and landed on his shoulder.